I largely agree with Peter's recent, insightful post about U.S. grand strategy, except when he says that "Compared to the Cold War period, we have more slack in our security environment."  In this he echoes Kori's earlier contention that "The world is much more conducive to American interests than [during the Cold War]: we are militarily dominant, the threats to us are fewer and less apocalyptic, our allies are more capable to handle their own problems, our enemies less so, and our values on the ascendancy."  This seems to be a fashionable view.  I recently heard an experienced foreign policy wonk claim at an event in D.C. that the United States currently faces "the lowest level of existential threat in U.S. history.

I disagree quite strongly -- not because the Cold War was such a wonderfully safe era, but because ours is more dangerous.  Peter and I have both heard the view from our students that the Cold War was, on hindsight, a time of roses and sunshine, and I think he is right to criticize it.  Our young students confuse simplicity with safety.  It was a simple, dangerous world:  nuclear war was simply terrifying.  I am (just) old enough to have a living memory of the Cold War and the feeling of dread and danger it fostered.  We were still doing duck-and-cover drills when I was in the 3^rd grade.  (Which always made me wonder:  if my 3rd grade desk was nuclear-bomb-proof, why didn't they make the Pentagon out of the same material?)

Peter is right that the Cold War was ridiculously dangerous.  During the Cold War the Soviet Union and China had nuclear and conventional capabilities superior to what North Korea and Iran have today, and the United States lost some 95,000 troops in two bloody wars in Korea and Vietnam.  During the Cold War the United States and Russia competed globally; any local conflict had the potential to escalate into global war in which the American homeland would be directly threatened.  This was without doubt a dangerous era. 

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President Obama is apparently going to announce the extent and pace of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan this week. His decision, in December 2009, to begin the withdrawal in July 2011 was never a good idea because it gave the Taliban the incentive to simply wait us out and accelerate the U.S. public's war fatigue. The best Obama can do now is mitigate the damage by highlighting our hard-won progress of the last two years and telling the American people that stability in Afghanistan is both important and possible, that it will take patience, and that our withdrawal will be measured, slow, and not come at the risk of defeat.

We'll see how Obama measures up to this. Meanwhile, an equally interesting question is, how do the Republican presidential candidates measure up? With the exception of Mitt Romney, not very well.

Leading neoconservative Republicans criticized front-runner Mitt Romney for his statement on Afghanistan during the Republican presidential debate last week. But I think his comment was actually one of the better statements on Afghanistan, compared with the others we've heard recently. Here's what he actually said: "It's time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can, consistent with the word that comes to our generals that we can hand the country over to the [Afghan] military in a way that they're able to defend themselves ... I think we've learned some important lessons in our experience in Afghanistan. I want those troops to come home based upon not politics, not based upon economics, but instead based upon the conditions on the ground determined by the generals. But I also think we've learned that our troops shouldn't go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation. Only the Afghanis [sic] can win Afghanistan's independence from the Taliban."

In other words, we should 1) heed the military's professional judgment, 2) withdraw based on conditions on the ground, and 3) resist withdrawing just to save a buck, and 4) demand more accountability from the Afghans. That's actually pretty good.

By contrast, Newt Gingrich did not directly address the issue of how many troops should be withdrawn, but he did say regarding foreign policy that "the price tag is always a factor." That's true in a trite and uninteresting sense: You don't want to bankrupt yourself unless your very survival is at stake. But Afghanistan is not bankrupting the U.S. Treasury. Much has been made about the price tag of the Afghanistan war, but the reality is that $100 billion per year is peanuts compared with what Iraq cost at its height and less than peanuts compared with the trillions we spend on entitlements and the broader defense budget. Gingrich seemed to imply that we can't afford the Afghanistan war: No one has yet explained how we can afford the consequences of rapid withdrawal.

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Fellow FP blogger David Rothkopf criticizes outgoing Defense Secretary Bob gates for daring to notice progress in Afghanistan. Rothkopf doubts that reconciliation with the Taliban is truly possible or that political progress "would actually ultimately make Afghanistan any more stable or any less likely to become a haven for terrorist groups." He argues that the 2014 deadline has eroded our leverage in negotiations with the Taliban and undermined our influence in post-war Afghanistan. Most incredibly, he believes that "ten years of waging this war have been so unfruitful" that any further effort is futile.

Rothkopf is right about the 2014 deadline and wrong about everything else. Take his assertion that a political deal with the Taliban has no prospect of improving stability in Afghanistan or denying safe haven to al-Qaeda. This seems to me a completely unfounded assertion. Post-war Afghanistan is not going to be a particularly pleasant place to live, but a post-war Afghanistan created by a negotiated settlement with most insurgents on terms favorable to us will almost certainly be a more pleasant, and safer, place than Afghanistan circa 2001 and one in which we will retain the ability to protect our interests in South Asia.

Rothkopf elides the difference between a sup-optimal outcome and complete failure. It is as if our failure to achieve perfection means that we should give up completely. Since we admittedly bungled the job for the first five or six years, paid an irreparable opportunity cost, and can no longer hope to achieve in Afghanistan what we could have if we had put out a good faith effort from the very beginning, we should, according to Rothkopf, call it quits.

This is nonsense. Rothkopf is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Perfection is out of our grasp, but we can still achieve better-than-awful. We won't get an A, but we might pull out a C, which is better than the F we'll get if we pull out too quickly. Notably Rothkopf does not describe what is likely to happen following a rapid American withdrawal (civil war, instability in Pakistan), the costs associated with those consequences, or how we should deal with that scenario. He can't, because all of those considerations prove that Rothkopf's prescription is worse than the disease.

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According to the New York Times, Pakistan has demanded that the United States halt drone strikes on Pakistani territory and draw down the number of CIA and Special Forces personnel in the country. The move is in response to the United States' insistence that Pakistan release American contractor Raymond Davis, who had been arrested on charges of murder. If true, and if Pakistan holds fast to its demands, the move could represent a watershed in U.S.-Pakistani relations.

Since 2001 U.S. relations with Pakistan have been premised on the idea that Pakistan shares U.S. interests in South Asia and is willing and able to cooperate with us. The first idea -- that we share interests -- is patently wrong. The second is increasingly doubtful. What then? What should U.S. policy towards Pakistan be?

For 60 years Pakistan has defined its national interest as the ability to compete with India, retain its hold on part of Kashmir, and advance its standing in the Muslim world. To that end it fought three wars (four if you count the Kargil conflict in 1999) with India since 1947, sought hegemony over Afghanistan as "strategic depth," developed nuclear weapons, and supported a range of militants as proxies against Afghanistan and India. None of this is in America's interest.

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"Pakistan is said to pursue a foothold in Afghanistan," reads today's headline. Breaking news? Old news, rather.

Nonetheless, the New York Times has done its readers a service by laying out clearly the danger the Pakistani military's intentions pose to the project of democratic state-building and security in Afghanistan. It has also reminded us, yet again, how President Obama's July 2011 date for the start of a U.S. troop drawdown has created a perverse incentive structure that encourages both the Afghan and Pakistani governments to hedge against the United States in this vital region. No matter how talented General David Petraeus proves to be commanding American and NATO forces, it is hard to see how our Afghan strategy can be successful absent a strategic reorientation by the Obama administration that creates a different calculus for leaders in Kabul and Rawalpindi (headquarters of the Pakistani armed forces) with regard to the Afghan endgame.

Pakistan's military intelligence establishment continues to define national security with reference to the weakness and pliability, rather than the strength, of its Afghan neighbor. There is both an external and an internal logic to this construction of national security.

Externally, Pakistan seeks "strategic depth" against India, whose influence and friendly relations with the government of President Hamid Karzai threaten the Pakistani nightmare of strategic encirclement. Moreover, the Pakistani security establishment's sponsorship of the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba is today what Pakistan's sponsorship of Kashmiri militants was in the 1980s and 1990s -- a strategic tool to target and weaken India through terrorist attacks while enabling Rawalpindi to claim plausible deniability. At the same time, Pakistan's close relationship with the forces of Sirajuddin Haqqani (an important al Qaeda ally) and the Afghan Taliban give it critical leverage in its dealings with Washington.  

Despite the billions of dollars of assistance the United States provides its South Asian ally, many members of Pakistan's strategic elite believe that, as a result of the influence Rawalpindi derives from its friendship with our enemies, the United States needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs the United States. In this view, if Pakistan severed its close links to selected militants, closed down their sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal regions, and fully endorsed the Western project in Afghanistan, Pakistani leaders might no longer enjoy the red-carpet treatment from Washington. Pakistan therefore derives strength in its dealings with America by pursuing differentiated strategic objectives rather than similar ones. This is a different conception of the notion of "ally" than applies to American relations with other key partners.

This reality, in turn, leads to the internal logic of Pakistani statecraft in Afghanistan. The military intelligence establishment's position at the core of Pakistani society and politics has been strengthened, not weakened, by Western intervention in Afghanistan over the past nine years (though the opposite would have been true had the West and our Afghan partners succeeded in building a functioning and accountable Afghan state that highlighted Pakistan's own political deficiencies). The war against al Qaeda and the Taliban made General Pervez Musharraf's military dictatorship appear indispensable to the United States. Following Pakistan's democratic transition (which Washington supported, though not soon enough) and the subsequent U.S. presidential succession, Obama forged a new Afghan strategy that has increasingly come to rely on Pakistan to deliver the Afghan Taliban (and perhaps also the militant networks run by Siraj Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) for an Afghan political settlement that would give these forces -- each currently allied in various ways with al Qaeda -- positions of power in a new Afghan constitutional settlement so that Western forces could come home.

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In a conversation about Kazakhstan's backsliding on democratic reforms, this story over at the Cable relates that President Obama downplayed any pressure by telling Kazakhstan's President Nazarbayev that the United States is still "working" on its own democracy. And in a rather clumsy effort to walk back from the obvious implication of moral equivalency between the Kazakh and American systems, NSC Senior Director Mike McFaul (who himself has a long-standing commitment to democracy promotion) pointed not to the strength of America's national principles but to, well, his own boss: "[Obama's] taken, I think, rather historic steps to improve our own democracy since coming to office here in the United States." 

The problem with these Obama Administration statements is not that they are technically false. Virtually every American would concede that, measured against a Platonic ideal, the American democratic system will always have areas for improvement. And virtually every American would also see President Obama's election as a historic achievement in light of America's troubled racial past.

The problem with President Obama's reported statements is rather than, in context, they are untrue and unhelpful. There are several reasons why:

• They are inaccurate. By any objective standard, American democracy is immeasurably more free, more vibrant, more healthy, and more democratic than the Kazakh autocracy.

• They are counterproductive. Despite its own democratic backsliding, Kazakhstan this year holds the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an organization with a robust democratic charter and a notable track record of supporting democratic institutions. The Nazarbayev regime pushed for years to get the chairmanship to burnish its own legitimacy, not to advance OSCE principles. If President Obama's intention was to get Kazakshtan to uphold its OSCE commitments, his words will backfire by instead sending the message to Nazarbayev that the U.S. isn't serious about pressing for significant reform. Kazakhstan's OSCE chairmanship had already been delayed by one year to allow time for Kazakhstan to make specific improvements in its own record. But given that Nazarbayev took few if any such steps -- and if anything the situation worsened with a widely-condemned internet regulation bill -- Kazakhstan seemed to be trying to call the OSCE's bluff. This latest message from the Obama administration will only further reinforce Nazarbayev's intransigence.

• They are demoralizing. Besides Nazarbayev himself, Obama's most important audience is the beleaguered Kazakh human rights and democracy activists, who need bold and unequivocal expressions of support from the most powerful and most free nation in the world -- not hand-wringing and moral equivalency. The Kazakh government didn't miss this opportunity to exploit the meeting. One can almost hear the smugness in the Kazakh Ambassador's voice from this Wall Street Journal story:

• Erlan Idrissov, Kazakstan's ambassador to the U.S., said in an interview that Mr. Obama offered Mr. Nazarbayev the Winston Churchill quote on democracy being "the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." "There was no pressure at all in the meeting," the ambassador said."

• They undermine American interests in a strategic region. Events this past week in Kyrgyzstan only further show how tumultuous yet important Central Asia is, whether for energy supplies, military basing, counterterrorism cooperation, or any number of other issues. Russia and China are playing their own new version of the "Great Game" for influence. The United States will not succeed by imitating them in downplaying values, but rather by offering a distinct alternative model to the region of transparency, accountability, and rule of law. This approach does not unrealistically preclude cooperation with unsavory autocracies; it rather makes clear that engagement is not just with governing rulers but with their citizens and societies as well.

• They undercut multilateralism. Kazakhstan's chairmanship threatens to erode the OSCE's historic effectiveness and credibility. If a hallmark of the Obama administration's foreign policy is strengthening multilateralism and international partnership, these statements don't help. Downplaying Kazakhstan's autocracy also diminishes the OSCE.

• They reinforce the narrative of President Obama as too willing to apologize for America's alleged misdeeds and imperfections, but not willing enough to defend American values. If this were an isolated incident, it might have drawn less attention. But it comes against the backdrop of a series of similar Presidential statements over the past year, and plays into a worrisome narrative of a President more impressed with himself than with the nation he leads.

President Obama addressed some of these last concerns admirably and forcefully in his Oslo speech last year. But with this latest missed opportunity with Kazakhstan, one worries that old habits might be returning.

By Daniel Blumenthal

An end of the year meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Japanese Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki exemplifies all that is wrong with Obama's Asia policy. In a matter of weeks, China blew up the Copenhagen climate change talks and humiliated President Obama, executed a mentally ill Brit on drug possession charges, and sentenced Liu Xiabo, the human rights activist and political reformer to 11 years in prison.

And what does the Administration do? Call in the Japanese ambassador to, as the Washington Post put it, tell him in "blunt, if diplomatic, terms that the United States remains adamant about moving a Marine base from one part of Okinawa to another."  

Are we really willing to wreck one of our most successful alliances over a real estate dispute? Meanwhile, as Washington hyperventilates about Japan's coming entente with China, Prime Minister Hatayoma just concluded a successful visit to India. A deeper Tokyo-Delhi security cooperation pact is not exactly a kowtow to China.

The "kick Japan kiss China approach" is indicative of a larger Obama problem: the inability to distinguish friends from rivals. The administration has frozen sales to Taiwan. Reports out of India indicate that the Obama administration "has signaled its intent to abandon elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including a joint military drill in Arunachal and any further Indo-U.S. naval maneuvers involving Japan or more parties like Australia."  

Despite stiffing Obama on issues from human rights (he was supposed to be more effective than his predecessors with his quiet diplomacy -- that was the justification for dissing the Dalai Lama), Iran, and climate change, China not only gets a pass, but sits back and grins as Washington undercuts its friends.

As the New Year approaches, it is high time for a review of Asia policy. I suggest beginning with a simple set of questions: why has not a single weapons system been sold to Taiwan, why are we escalating a real estate dispute with Japan to ruinous levels, why is our free trade agreement with South Korea still frozen, and why are we rolling back our cooperation with India? If we are sacrificing pro-ally initiatives for the sake of better relations with China it is not working.

David Gray-Pool/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

With America's newspaper running a huge story on the casket ceremony at Dover, and with NATO allies struggling with the mounting human toll in Afghanistan, it is appropriate to return to the issue of how casualties affect public support for continuing the war. As it happens, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates addressed this very issue himself in a wide-ranging interview published over the weekend in the LA Times.

Gates's thesis is largely correct. According to the LA Times:

Gates said that Americans would have the patience to continue the war in Afghanistan only if the new military approach began to move the conflict out of deadlock. 'If we can show progress, and we are headed in the right direction, and we are not in a stalemate where we are taking significant casualties, then you can put more time on the Washington clock,' he said."

This is an adequate bumper-sticker summary of the argument that my colleagues and I developed, although a more complete summary would note that public prospective expectations of success interact with their retrospective judgments about the rightness or wrongness of the war. In the Afghanistan case, both are in play -- surprisingly so since there is no WMD-intelligence-failure to undermine the rationale for the Afghan war. Yet Gates is right to emphasize the prospective judgment about success because that is the one that is most in jeopardy and, I would argue, most affected by prevailing elite debates.

So how can the Obama team shore up public support for Afghanistan? First and foremost, they have to develop a strategy that will, in fact, lead to success. Facts on the ground matter and no amount of lipstick can beautify a pig. The Obama team is still feeling its way in Afghanistan but the combo of Gates-Petraeus-McChrystal does inspire confidence that they will adjust the strategy as needed to maximize the chance for success, provided that they have the support of the President. Essentially this same team (plus General Odierno and Ambassador Crocker) did just that in Iraq in 2007. Back then they had the unqualified support of the President -- they were, after all, implementing the new strategy he had developed and chosen -- and they refined the "surge" strategy as needed to produce remarkable results on the ground. Something like that is necessary in Afghanistan now.

Necessary, but not sufficient because such changes may take time and the public must be persuaded to hang in there while the strategy plays itself out. For this piece, presidential rhetorical leadership matters and a persuasive account to the public on the strategy and how to evaluate its effectiveness in light of unfolding events is essential. In short, the Obama team must develop credible measures of effectiveness and articulate them. The Obama team has already indicated that they are trying to identify such measures, seeking to avoid the measures that the media sensationalize -- attack numbers and kill numbers -- and focusing instead on indicators related to local governance and economic development.

As it happens, the Bush Administration wrestled with just this sort of problem. In the declassified explanation of the pre-surge Iraq strategy released in November 2005, the Administration sought to identify for the American public how to evaluate the progress (or lack thereof) of what was dubbed the "stand-up/stand-down" strategy:

We track numerous indicators to map the progress of our strategy and change our tactics whenever necessary. Detailed reports - both classified and unclassified - are issued weekly, monthly, and quarterly by relevant agencies and military units.

• Many of these reports with detailed metrics are released to the public, and are readily accessible. For example:
  • Gains in training Iraqi security forces are updated weekly at www.mnstci.iraq.centcom.mil;
  • Improvements in the economy and infrastructure are collected weekly by the State Department (www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rpt/iraqstatus/) as well as USAID, which continually updates its many ongoing programs and initiatives in Iraq (www.usaid.gov/iraq);
  • Extensive reports are also made every three months to Congress, and are accessible at the State (www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rpt/2207/) and Defense (www.defenselink.mil/pubs/) Department websites.
  • Americans can read and assess these reports to get a better sense of what is being done in Iraq and the progress being made on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

• Some of the most important metrics we track are:
  • Political: The political benchmarks set forth in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546 and the Transitional Administrative Law; the number of Iraqis from all areas willing to participate in the political process as evidenced by voter registration and turnout.
  • Security: The quantity and quality of Iraqi units; the number of actionable intelligence tips received from Iraqis; the percentage of operations conducted by Iraqis alone or with minor Coalition assistance; the number of car bombs intercepted and defused; offensive operations conducted by Iraqi and Coalition forces; and the number of contacts initiated by Coalition forces, as opposed to the enemy.
  • Economic: GDP; per capita GDP; inflation; electricity generated and delivered; barrels of oil produced and exported; and numbers of businesses opened.

• Other indicators are also important to success, but less subject to precise measurement, such as the extent to which principles of transparency, trust in government institutions, and acceptance of the rule of law are taking hold amongst a population that has never known them.

• These indicators have more strategic significance than the metrics that the terrorists and insurgents want the world to use as a measure of progress or failure: number of bombings."

Such efforts at public persuasion can have an effect. In the academic study I did with my Duke colleagues, we discovered that the measures of effectiveness that the public identified as the ones they watched to see if the Iraq war was leading to success or failure were essentially the very same ones that the Bush Administration emphasized in its own rhetoric. In my judgment, this was so for two reasons: (1) the Bush Administration rhetoric on this issue was reasonable -- the measures of effectiveness the Administration was emphasizing were plausible and grounded in a reasonable "theory of the case" and so persuasive to a rational public; and (2) the Bush Administration devoted extraordinary amounts of presidential capital, especially time and focus, on the Iraq war.

I am reasonably confident that the Obama team will develop a similarly well-grounded "theory of the case" in Afghanistan. And I am very confident that this team has the rhetorical chops to persuade the American people, should they devote the effort to doing so. I am less confident that they will devote that effort because they have launched so many other initiatives requiring equal-or-greater expenditures of presidential capital.

A last word: the Obama team needs to minimize self-inflicted wounds of the Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot sort. The public will not believe the Obama team is on a successful trajectory if they themselves indicate they are more preoccupied by short-term politics of the matter than the substance. Such a perception is harmful and unnecessary. The truth is that President Obama is a war-time commander-in-chief and, like all war-time commanders-in-chief, his political fortunes will rise or fall with success in the war. Ultimately, focusing on getting national security right is both good policy and good politics.

U.S. Department of Defense/The National Security Archive via Getty Images